July 14, 2015

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has awarded a patent (US 9,068,562) to Boeing engineers and scientists for a laser- and nuclear-driven airplane engine.

“A stream of pellets containing nuclear material such as Deuterium or Tritium is fed into a hot-stop within a thruster of the aircraft,” Patent Yogi explains. “Then multiple high powered laser beams are all focused onto the hot-spot. The pellet is… read more

July 14, 2015

3D printers could revolutionize food processing in the next 10 to 20 years, said Hod Lipson, Ph.D., a professor of engineering at Columbia University, speaking at IFT15: Where Science Feeds Innovation.

“The technology is getting faster, cheaper, and better by the minute. Food printing could be the killer app for 3D printing.”

Has a thermal conductivity capacity four times higher than copper, can be attached to silicon electronic components

July 13, 2015

A method for efficiently cooling electronics using graphene-based film — with a thermal conductivity capacity four times higher than copper — has been developed by researchers at Chalmers University of Technology. The film can be attached to computer chips and other silicon-based electronic components.

Electronic systems available today accumulate a great deal of heat, mostly due to the ever-increasing demand on functionality. Getting rid of excess… read more

July 13, 2015

IBM Research has announced the semiconductor industry’s first 7nm (nanometer) node test chips, which could allow for chips with more than 20 billion transistors, IBM believes — a big step forward from today’s most advanced chips, made using 14nm technology.

IBM achieved the 7 nm node through a combination of new materials, tools and techniques, explained Mukesh Khare, VP, IBM Semiconductor Technology Research in a blog post.… read more

July 13, 2015

Don’t freak out if you see a 40-foot bus resembling a coffin sometime soon. It’s the “Immortality Bus” — a “pro-science symbol of resistance against aging and death” to be driven across the U.S. by futurist and 2016 Transhumanist Party presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan, along with scientists and supporters.

July 10, 2015

European scientists have taught volunteers in an experiment how to determine the thickness of a titanium dioxide thin film only a few nanometers thick by simply observing the color it presents under under highly controlled, precise lighting conditions, according to Sandy Peterhänsel, University of Stuttgart, Germany and principal author of an open-access paper in the journal Optica.

July 10, 2015

Engineers at Harvard University and the University of California, San Diego, have created the first robot with a 3D-printed body that transitions from a rigid core to a soft exterior. The robot is capable of more than 30 untethered jumps at a time and is powered by a mix of butane and oxygen.

The researchers describe the robot’s design, manufacturing and testing in the July… read more

July 10, 2015

In Self/Less, a science-fiction thriller to be released in the U.S. today, July 10, 2015, Damian Hale, an extremely wealthy aristocrat (Ben Kingsley) dying from cancer, undergoes a $250 million radical medical procedure at a lab called Phoenix Biogenic in Manhattan to have his consciousness transferred into the body of a healthy young man (Ryan Reynolds).… read more

July 10, 2015

Duke University neuroscientists have created a network called “Brainet” that uses signals from an array of electrodes implanted in the brains of multiple rodents in experiments to merge their collective brain activity and jointly control a virtual avatar arm or even perform sophisticated computations — including image pattern recognition and even weather forecasting.

July 9, 2015

University of California, Berkeley, physicists have used graphene to build lightweight ultrasonic loudspeakers and microphones, enabling people to mimic bats or dolphins’ ability to use sound to communicate and gauge the distance and speed of objects around them.

More practically, the wireless ultrasound devices complement standard radio transmission using electromagnetic waves in areas where radio is impractical, such as underwater, but with far greater fidelity than current ultrasound or sonar… read more

Crowdsourcing brain data with hundreds of adults could be a new frontier in neuroscience and could lead to new insights about the brain

July 9, 2015

In a large-scale art-science installation called My Virtual Dream in Toronto in 2013, more than 500 adults wearing a Muse wireless electroencephalography (EEG) headband inside a 60-foot geodesic dom participated in an unusual neuroscience experiment.

As they played a collective neurofeedback computer game where they were required to manipulate their mental states of relaxation and concentration, the group’s collective EEG signals triggered a catalog of… read more

One of the first devices to use the unique electronic and optical properties of graphene for a practical application

July 9, 2015

European scientists have harnessed graphene’s unique optical and electronic properties to develop a highly sensitive sensor to detect molecules such as proteins and drugs — one of the first such applications of graphene.

The results are described in an article appearing in the latest edition of the journal Science.

The researchers at EPFL’s Bionanophotonic Systems Laboratory (BIOS) and the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO, Spain) used graphene to improve… read more

July 8, 2015

A group of researchers at KAIST in Korea has developed a wireless-power transfer (WPT) technology that allows mobile devices in the “Wi-Power” zone (within 0.5 meters from the power source) to be charged at any location and in any direction and orientation, tether-free.

The WPT system is capable of charging 30 smartphones with a power capacity of one watt each or 5 laptops with 2.4 watts.